Truthful mechanisms for agents that value privacy

Y Chen, S Chong, IA Kash, T Moran… - ACM Transactions on …, 2016 - dl.acm.org
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC), 2016dl.acm.org
Recent work has constructed economic mechanisms that are both truthful and differentially
private. In these mechanisms, privacy is treated separately from truthfulness; it is not
incorporated in players' utility functions (and doing so has been shown to lead to
nontruthfulness in some cases). In this work, we propose a new, general way of modeling
privacy in players' utility functions. Specifically, we only assume that if an outcome o has the
property that any report of player i would have led to o with approximately the same …
Recent work has constructed economic mechanisms that are both truthful and differentially private. In these mechanisms, privacy is treated separately from truthfulness; it is not incorporated in players’ utility functions (and doing so has been shown to lead to nontruthfulness in some cases). In this work, we propose a new, general way of modeling privacy in players’ utility functions. Specifically, we only assume that if an outcome o has the property that any report of player i would have led to o with approximately the same probability, then o has a small privacy cost to player i. We give three mechanisms that are truthful with respect to our modeling of privacy: for an election between two candidates, for a discrete version of the facility location problem, and for a general social choice problem with discrete utilities (via a VCG-like mechanism). As the number n of players increases, the social welfare achieved by our mechanisms approaches optimal (as a fraction of n).
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